She’d tried. The book was a serious-looking thing—she’d had to order it online, since the academic publisher that had put it out twenty years ago was now out of business, and it had cost her fifty-five dollars for the paperback. She’d picked it up again and again over the past two weeks, as she’d planned this meeting; yet whenever she focused intently on one of Anderson’s cases, her brain began to fog up with confusion.
The book was filled with case studies, children in Thailand and Lebanon and India and Myanmar and Sri Lanka who had made statements about other mothers and other homes. These children behaved in a way that was at odds with their family or village cultures and sometimes had intense attachments to strangers, who lived hours away from them, whom they seemed to remember from previous lifetimes. They often had phobias. The cases were compelling and strangely familiar.… Yet how could they be true?
She found herself going over the same cases without finding any clarity of belief or disbelief. In the end she couldn’t read them at all but absorbed, like a clammy mist, the impression of something deeply unsettling. Children who seemed to remember lives spent selling jasmine or growing rice in a village somewhere in Asia until they were hit by a motorcycle, or burned by a kerosene lamp—lives that had nothing (or everything) to do with Noah.
Janie ran her fingers through her son’s soft hair, grateful for once for the television affixed to the wall above their heads. (When had restaurants joined airports in assuming their customers needed to be endlessly glued to the tube?) She pulled out the computer printout she’d tucked in the binder and looked again at the doctor’s qualifications:
Jerome Anderson
M.D.: Harvard Medical School
B.A.: Yale University, English Literature
Psychiatry Residency at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, New York, NY
Professor of Psychiatry, University of Connecticut School of Medicine
Robert B. Angsley Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at The Institute for the Study of Previous Personalities, University of Connecticut School of Medicine
The meaning of these words was clear enough, and she clung to it: an educated man. She was simply getting another expert’s opinion. That’s all it was. And it didn’t really matter what his methods were, as long as he got results. Maybe this doctor had some sort of especially soothing approach with children, the way some people could placate horses. It was an experimental procedure. You read about things like that all the time. It didn’t matter what Noah had, or what Anderson thought he had, so long as he was cured.
She flipped through the binder she’d put together for him. It was the same type of binder she used when courting new clients, except instead of town houses and apartments, each section was marked by a colored tab signifying a year in Noah’s life. The binder had all of Noah’s information, the odd things he’d said and done: everything, except the crucial thing. She hadn’t mentioned Dr. Remson or his possible diagnosis, worried that Anderson might balk at working with a child who might be mentally ill.
It was odd to be meeting him at a busy diner. Dr. Anderson had suggested meeting at her home—it was his usual protocol, it makes the children more comfortable, he’d said—but she needed to get a sense of the man first, do a quick kook check, so they’d compromised on the place at the corner. Still, what kind of a doctor made home visits? Maybe he was a quack, after all—
“Ms. Zimmerman?”
A man stood over her: a tall, lean figure wearing an oversize navy blue wool sweater and khaki pants.
“You’re Dr. Anderson?”
“Jerry.” He smiled briefly, a flash of teeth in the crowded room, and extended his hand to her, then Noah, who glanced away from the TV just long enough to brush Anderson’s huge hand with his tiny one.
Whatever she’d been expecting (someone professional, maybe a bit geeky, with the sharp profile and dark, curly hair she’d glimpsed in the video), it wasn’t this man. This was a person pared down to his essence, with the high cheekbones and glittering eyes of an Egyptian cat deity and the weathered skin of a fisherman. He must have been handsome once (the face had a fierce, elemental beauty) but was now somehow too austere for that, as if he had left handsome by the side of the road many years back, as something for which he had no use.
“I’m sorry if that sounded rude. It’s just on the video you seemed—”
“Younger?” He bent slightly in her direction, and a whiff of something came off of him: she had a sense of something unruly running beneath the elegant, contained surface. “Time does that.”
Just pretend it’s a client, she told herself. She shifted modes, smiled professionally. “I’m a little nervous,” she said. “This isn’t exactly my sort of thing.”
He settled himself across from her in the booth. “That’s good.”
“It is?”